Intellectual Property and Privacy

[c9]

"The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying."

-- John Carmack, head of id software, home of Doom

Two interesting reads can be found here.

1. Richard Stallman was stopped by UN Security for his advocacy of tinfoil hats. Well, not really. He covered his RFID badge with foil, and encouraged others to do to. UN Security decided that made him a threat. In 2003 the UN promised to not use RFID this year because of complaints then. Instead, they simply hid it.

RFID is radio-frequency identification, and it means that someone can read your ID without you even taking it out of your pocket. It's used for electronic toll passes, among other things. Sounds convenient, but imagine if that person following you down the street late at night suddenly knew where you lived? What if you simply window-shopped in Old Navy, and the next week you started getting spam emails and flyers from them? There are many privacy dangers there.

2. Bruce Perens' speech on the dangers of software patents. Software patents let companies claim they invented things like opening a menu, or clicking a button to buy something on a website. Once they have a patent, current law says they can charge you for having a similar feature on your website, or force you to stop using it. This means that companies can take other companies to court if they don't like their competition, and simply spend enough on lawyers to win. This is already happening, right here in Canada too. Research in Motion is under attack by a tiny company called NTP. NTP has almost no assets other than a patent on something that RIM's Blackberries do.

Not everyone sees issues with this. Read Perens' speech about how Open Source (free) software is helping under-developed countries catch up technologically, and how software patents could utterly destroy the power of open source. Sorry sub-Saharan Africa, you have to pay $149 USD for Windows XP before you're allowed to have a computer. What, that's two years' salary? That's a shame.

Update: Check out this ecommerce site that infringes 20 patents.

Comments

[c9.livejournal.com]

Open Polar Bear can't use training materials I created, because they are *copyrighted*. Once they fall into the public domain, then they're fine.

But if I invented a new way to run a class, in essence came up with a new agenda for Word 2000 L1, I don't feel that I should be able to prevent others from discovering that better agenda on their own. Maybe people who attend my courses can't start teaching their own courses with my same agenda (both literally, as the table of contents and agenda are copyrighted, and figuratively, as I have them sign a no-compete agreement), but if someone discovers the same way I did, I don't think I have the right to prevent them from using that knowledge.

I'm not 100% against, it's an area I don't know well enough to be certain. But to be honest, I have yet to see a single argument that scales well. Yes, IP protection protects your salary. But when scaled to 1,000,000,000 users, IP protection hurts entire countries.

More Patent stuff from Bill Gates...

[c9.livejournal.com]

Taken from http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/en/m/dangers/index.html:

Patents turn software publishing into the privilege of a few. Of course, everyone can still develop software. However, in a world with countless software patents, only large corporations are equipped to deal with the incremental costs and legal risks. Even they will increasingly take a negative view on software patents if patent inflation rages on.

The biggest problem is that patents are valid for 20 years. In a slow-paced industry, that may be acceptable. For computer software, that means anything which was considered a groundbreaking invention in the days of the Commodore 64 should still enjoy patent protection today. Even the greatest visionaries of the IT industry have never been able to predict the next 20 years. Just a 2-year horizon is a major challenge in the software market. However, the "patent mafia" claims that patent examiners were capable of deciding today what type of software concepts should be monopolized for 20 years to come. So much hubris is ridiculous and frightening at the same time.

"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today."
Bill Gates (1991)